Tweet [1]
Jeffrey Tucker praises the Dreamliner’s glory and majesty [2].
In a rare action of bipartisanship—which once again proves that bipartisanship should be feared by those of us who believe in smaller government—the Democrats and Republicans jointly embraced increased spending on everything, as well as another successful effort to bust spending caps on defense and nondefense spending.
Several days ago in the Wall Street Journal Richard McKenzie wrote about the frailty of human memories [4]. A slice:
The more remote a memory is in time, the less reliable it tends to be, partly because of decay and partly because recalled memories can be corrupted by new information. New and old memories can be conflated, sometimes emerging as totally false memories. Memories can be warped by leading questions from therapists, lawyers, journalists or others.
My colleague Elizabeth Loftus was able to “implant” false memories in a significant subset of laboratory subjects by showing them an official-looking poster of Disney characters, including Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. Many subjects later remembered meeting Bugs Bunny on a childhood trip to Disneyland. Some of them even reported that Bugs had touched them inappropriately.
That was impossible. Bugs Bunny isn’t a Disney character.
Here’s Tyler Cowen on William Nordhaus [5] and Paul Romer [6] – the deserving co-winners of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Ryan Bourne explains that Amazon’s recently announced pay raise for its workers ought not be interpreted as evidence in support of an increase in government-mandated minimum wages [7]. (HT David Levey)
My GMU Econ colleague Mark Koyama is not impressed with Yoram Hazony’s case for nationalism [8].
Simon Lester and Inu Manak evaluate the new Nafta – a.k.a. the USMCA [9]. And here’s Dan Ikenson on the same [10]. Here’s Dan’s conclusion:
The only certainty is that the USMCA is better than a U.S. withdrawal from NAFTA without a replacement agreement. That bullet appears to have been dodged. Beyond that, the best that can be said of the USMCA is that the negotiations – especially the animating theatrics, insults, and tantrums that came with the talks – are finished and the dark clouds of uncertainty hanging over the region should begin to dissipate…only to be replaced by darker clouds over the descent of U.S. relations with China and the WTO.